I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Oct 2015
Interview
Over the phone with a shared text editor from a testing site. The interviewer started with general experience questions and moved onto technical questions about items on resume. Then there was a basic question about looping through an array which I answered verbally then wrote up the solution and discussed alternatives. The second question was more difficult to get an optimal solution and involved iterating on a basic solution. The interview ended with me asking a set of questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Count the number of occurrences of an element in a sorted array
The interview process started with a screening round featuring one LeetCode medium problem and an SQL challenge. This was followed by a comprehensive onsite with five rounds: a LeetCode coding challenge, an SQL assessment, a system design interview, a hiring manager conversation to evaluate cultural fit, and finally a team matching phase to find the right team.
Interviewed for an SDE role. The process was well-organized and the recruiters were responsive throughout. That said, the technical rounds were significantly more challenging than expected — definitely come prepared to go deep. Overall a valuable experience regardless of the outcome.
That was a real stroke of luck — when I got to the coding round and encountered a question on finding the maximum subarray sum, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com a few days earlier. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview. It was intense, especially with the focus on algorithms and data structures. I also faced some behavioral questions that challenged my experience. After a final onsite round, I received an offer and happily accepted. Overall, it was tough but rewarding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an integer array nums, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum and return its sum. Walk through Kadane's algorithm and explain the O(n) approach.